LSO/Bychkov - review

Monday 2 April 2012 13.19 EDT
First published on Monday 2 April 2012 13.19 EDT

Performances of Mahler's Third Symphony may not be as rare as they used to be, but each one is still an event, and a challenge for any conductor. Semyon Bychkov made his debut with the London Symphony Orchestra two years ago, and an invitation back to conduct one of the longest works in the regular symphonic repertoire suggests the initial acquaintance went very well. Certainly the orchestral playing in this performance couldn't be faulted, but Bychkov's interpretation raised many more questions.

If the Third is the work in which Mahler comes closest to realising his famous dictum that a symphony must be "like the world – it must embrace everything", then the world Bychkov envisaged was a strangely hyperreal one, in which everything seemed to be pushed to extremes. The huge first movement set the tone. Instead of a single integrated structure, it was presented as a frieze of isolated events, a pageant in which each musical image was sharp-etched and luridly lit; the drum strokes were apocalyptic, the fortissimos threateningly fierce, so that by its end you were not exhilarated, just battered into submission.

Bychkov's tactics in the rest of the work may not have been so confrontational, but they were equally extreme. Tempi were sometimes exaggeratedly slow, accelerations unexpectedly abrupt, though the vocal movements provided some relief – Christiane Stotijn was a rather uninvolving mezzo in the fourth movement's Nietzsche setting, the women of the London Symphony Chorus impersonated the Knaben Wunderhorn angels in the fifth, with the Tiffin Boys' Choir supplying the bims and the bams. Then the focus was back on Bychkov and the orchestra for the finale, with perhaps the greatest melody Mahler ever composed turned into an exercise in extreme refinement and pianissimo string playing; one was impressed but never remotely moved.